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THE BURGESS PET CARE RESPONSE TO THE DAILY MAIL ARTICLE "ARE WE POISONING OUR PETS THROUGH THE FOOD WE GIVE THEM?" DAILY MAIL - 1 MARCH 2010

Thursday 04th March 2010

For cats and dogs we use butchers' offcuts, many fresh local ingredients and we add the essential vitamins and minerals to guarantee the nutritional performance of our food. All that we advise is any owner supplementing our complete meals with other ingredients (e.g. snacks, treats or family leftovers), takes care to avoid overfeeding; obesity has become one of the major health issues facing pets today. If you are worried your pet is overweight, talk to your vet or visit the Pet Size-o-meter [PFMA link here] and if they are why not switch to one of our many light diets?

Further on the article raised the needs of our smallest pets, all too often forgotten and something we at Burgess Pet Care have long championed. As leaders in small animal nutrition and with the Excel brand recommended by 90% of vets you can be assured that we have already covered all of the points mentioned. Indeed we would go further and seek to correct some of the advice given.

Specifically we are concerned that the advice to give guinea pigs salad bowls twice daily will lead to stomach upsets or worse. The guinea advice should be more in line with the rabbit comments; guinea pigs are in fact fibrevores, (a sub-set of herbivores) and require high levels of digestible and indigestible fibre, not found in salad. Lots of good quality forage together with a high quality nugget such as Burgess Excel will guarantee they get their vitamin C, without risk of accidental overdosing.

Hamsters are indeed omnivores but please stick to the right sort of protein. Burgess Supahamster contains mealworms, much closer to their natural diet of bugs and insects rather than the rather strange advice to give chicken or turkey.

Finally although the section on rabbit diet offers some good advice, the author has missed that all of this is already delivered through the Excel Feeding Plan and that in the depths of winter fresh uncut grass is hard to come by. The article could have reminded owners that vets agree that no one food for a rabbit can be described as complete. They need a feeding plan made up of good forage, a high fibre fortified nugget and healthy snacks to encourage natural foraging behavour.

You can be confident a food made in Britain meets the very stringent legislation present and will ensure any food you buy is safe and of a high quality.

Thankfully our pets are leading longer, healthier lives due to the many advances in understanding of their dietary needs.

Should you still have any concerns regarding how to feed your pet, do not hesitate to call the Burgess Pet Care Consumer Care line to talk to Emma or Suzanne who will be only too happy to help and advise.

Paul Miley

Managing Director of Burgess Pet Care

(and owner of Sassie, Reef, Fluffy, Dosh, Izzy and Geordie)

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